Spotify - anyone heard of it?

(I needed to hear a few Mekons songs I didn't know, I went to Youtube instead)

"You have forced Spotify to quit. Send a report to Apple"

i was able to roll back to an old version after they removed the search bar (lol thx dudes), iirc i just googled for it and found a page with a bunch of diff revisions & was back in business. you might need to change some permissions so it doesn't auto-update but it'll work fine.

it is definitely bloating to unpleasant proportions

I'm running the same version on a late 2013 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 and I have to say it's … completely fine, when God knows many things on this MacBook are really not any more. I do have 8GB of RAM so I guess that could be the difference but really, Chrome quite regularly seizes up on this machine (and the other day, Notes!) so I wonder if not about bloat and more something specific that gets fucked up with the installation or preferences on some machines.

I use the browser version, no bloat (and no ads!)

On my 2013 iMac at work the application is useless, freezes all the time, doesn't do searches or anything really, same as Sleeve. Can only use the webplayer.

The browser version has lower sound quality, though, no?

The app experience on my Windows PC is pretty dreadful, it drags and noticeably slows down after running for more than 15 minutes, and sometimes even freezes the whole fucking computer. The Android version was fine until fairly recently but lately it's been crashing a lot and I get the 'offline mode' error when I'm not. I'm thinking of cancelling my subscription as well, there's no point in paying for something that makes me want to pull my hair out in frustration.

Not sure about the lower quality, I wouldn't notice that cause of the in-built imac speakers not being great obv. But yeah, it's frustrating as hell that the app is woeful.

Premium user here, using the Android app. I used to be able to download a whole album and then remove certain tracks from it. So if I downloaded a whole reissued album including bonus tracks, for example, I could remove those bonus tracks from the download which I didn't want, in order to save space. But now it seems to have changed so that it's all or nothing. Every track has the little green downward arrow next to it, indicating that it's been downloaded, but if I tap the three dots menu next to an individual track there is no option to remove that track, as there used to be. I can remove the whole album download and that's it. Am I missing something?

Can you make a playlist of just the tracks you want and download THAT instead? Works for me.

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/spotify-book-authors-interview-daniel-ek-steve-jobs-1203277715/

I'm always a little disappointed when I open this thread and people are complaining about functionality rather than their effect on music /the music industry.

After reading all of these complaints about the various Spotify interfaces, I'm forced to wonder: Anybody else using Daphile's "Spotty" plug-in? It's not perfect, but it's all business compared to the app and browser versions.

Daphile is a bit of a pain to massage into compliance, but once it works . . .

And, Jordan, I buy expensive vinyl and cheap CD box sets. So fuck off.

Hey I use it too, I'm as guilty as anybody.

I use Spotty on Logitech Media Server... in addition to desktop and Android Spotify, which I've been lucky enough with. This is the first I'm hearing of "daphile".. what's the advantage over LMS?

There are plenty of discussions on ilx about the state of the business/streaming. Do we need one specific to Spotify in that regard?

Nevermind.. just looked up Daphile, another repackaging of LMS. Cool. I've used piCorePlayer similarly. Right now since I've got a Windows server always on, it's just LMS on that.

Definitely recommend some flavour of LMS to anyone who listens to much of anything at home, in more than one room and/or one computer.

If anyone previously checked out the Spotify integration, it's slicker these days with Spotify Connect integration and all that.

I guess people use Tidal/Apple Music, but Spotify feels close to becoming a genericized trademark for streaming. Happy to move my complaints to another thread and leave this for Spotify minutiae though.

I will fight proprietary eponyms until I fall over

I'd just like to randomly drop a complaint about how Spotify won't allow you to follow labels, and in some clients (iOS for sure) won't even search by label. I've always discovered new music by exploring catalogs of smaller curated labels. Maybe Spotify has some interest in diminishing the importance of the label? I'd much rather quickly build a playlist based on a label than what an algorithm things fits a mood. </old man rant>

Some labels have accounts that are worth following. Numero Group, notably.

I'm always a little disappointed when I open this thread and people are complaining about functionality rather than their effect on music /the music industry.

― change display name (Jordan), Wednesday, July 24, 2019 11:41 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

i was able to roll back to an old version after they removed the search bar (lol thx dudes)

Search bar is back! back!! back!!! Bad idea was bad.

My Windows and Android clients both run very smoothly atm. But I do pretty much loathe the "always be tinkering" ethos they and seemingly everyone else have bought into the last decade or so.

Maybe this is why you outsource GUI design? So you don't have to find things for the designers on staff to do all the time.

Man, the new Frankie Rose single, "Back", that showed up in Release Radar is a big surprise. Wasn't expecting her to go in that direction.

I saw that too, was sure it was a new song by Beck called Frankie Rose

ugh, very annoying, was excited for a second there

Lol I got that too. I was hoping she’d go trap!

Label data, unfortunately, is extremely messy. It's just label names entered as text by the licensors, at the moment. So although we (Spotify) would like to be able to have label pages like we have artist pages, we're a long way from being able to do that coherently...

I'd just like to randomly drop a complaint about how Spotify won't allow you to follow labels, and in some clients (iOS for sure) won't even search by label.

I agree that label related features are generally bad, and would very much like label specific pages etc., but as far as I can tell, searches still work. for example, label:"posh isolation" year:2019 gets me what I would expect across all clients that I've tried.

I agree that label related features are generally bad, and would very much like label specific pages etc., but as far as I can tell, searches still work. for example, /label:"posh isolation" year:2019/ gets me what I would expect across all clients that I've tried.

Am noticing a fair bit of playlist degradation, with tracks no longer available to play, even though the albums are. Do albums get removed and re-added, and if so is any effort made to re-synch with tracks that were previously added to playlists?

In fact it looks like 90% of the songs on playlists I transferred from itunes a few years ago, using an automated service on the web, are no longer available :(

Noticed this as well, older lists built with a lot of Local Files of music that is clearly available in the spotify library are mostly not recognized anymore.

WHY THE FUCK DO THE CONSTANTLY CHANGE THIS APP FOR NO GOOD FUCKING REASON ?

local files wish ye was heyah

Local Files is pretty decent these days all in all (finding stuff you add there instantly) as long as you don't care about wanting to update track metadata within the app (which I still do in MediaMonkey now and then as that had the best approach for this I've ever encountered).

Going between phone and desktop apps though and I keep having to manually clear the playlist queue on the phone only for it to keep coming back - this seems worse than ever lately and keeps catching me out as I forget there had previously been a queue (rightly, having removed each track from it manually on the phone app already) so really jarring when you expect the next track in a playlist or on an album instead. There isn't even a 'Clear entire Queue' option to at least do this with one click or touch.

(finding stuff you add there instantly)

if only

One very annoying thing about Spotify is the way it treats EPs. They are listed with the artist’s singles - which is fine in itself if you’re not going to make a separate section for them. The problem is that instead of being listed chronologically along with those singles EPs are relegated all the way to the bottom of the singles listing. So if someone has released, say, 25 singles since 2012, you’d have to remind yourself to look below all of those for that new EP they might have released this year. It’s completely counterintuitive.

(I’m talking mobile here, the desktop version is pretty much unusable anyway, as others have mentioned)

if only

I should've added 'once you search for it' there true

One very annoying thing about Spotify is the way it treats EPs. They are listed with the artist’s singles - which is fine in itself if you’re not going to make a separate section for them. The problem is that instead of being listed chronologically along with those singles EPs are relegated all the way to the bottom of the singles listing. So if someone has released, say, 25 singles since 2012, you’d have to remind yourself to look below all of those for that new EP they might have released this year. It’s completely counterintuitive.

do you have an example of this? everything I've seen has all of the singles and EPs grouped together in descending release date order. for example, here what I got from the Carla Dal Forno artist page:

Name: Took A Long Time
Release Date: 2019-07-24
Number of Tracks: 1

Name: So Much Better
Release Date: 2019-04-16
Number of Tracks: 2

Name: Top Of The Pops
Release Date: 2018-10-12
Number of Tracks: 6

Name: The Garden
Release Date: 2017-10-06
Number of Tracks: 4

Name: What You Gonna Do Now?
Release Date: 2016-08-03
Number of Tracks: 1

Name: Fast Moving Cars
Release Date: 2016-04-29
Number of Tracks: 2

this is also the way they come back from the API. as a heavy Spotify user, I'm not saying that there aren't things that drive me crazy about the UI, but I also see stuff in this thread that doesn't make sense.

See, with me it’s different.
In descending order:

Took A Long Time (2019) (isolated above the Albums section, as Latest Release)
So Much Better (2019)
What You Gonna Do Now (2016)
Fast Moving Cars (2016)
Top Of The Pops (2018)
The Garden (2017)
(with the last two being EPs)

You are talking about the mobile version, right?

See, with me it’s different.
In descending order:

Took A Long Time (2019) (isolated above the Albums section, as Latest Release)
So Much Better (2019)
What You Gonna Do Now (2016)
Fast Moving Cars (2016)
Top Of The Pops (2018)
The Garden (2017)
(with the last two being EPs)

You are talking about the mobile version, right?

See, with me it’s different.
In descending order:

Took A Long Time (2019) (isolated above the Albums section, as Latest Release)
So Much Better (2019)
What You Gonna Do Now (2016)
Fast Moving Cars (2016)
Top Of The Pops (2018)
The Garden (2017)
(with the last two being EPs)

You are talking about the mobile version, right?

Another strange thing my Spotify is doing, it plays every song three times in a row.

seems to have spread to yr posting

as I jokingly tried to acknowledge

The order I gave is what I see on desktop, web, and Android. I guess I can check it on iOS when I get home from work to see if it's the same.

When you request artist albums from the API, there's an album_type parameter that lets you pass one of the following: 'album', 'single', or 'compilation'. there is also an album_group parameter that includes 'album', 'single', 'compilation', and 'appears_on'. I assume this is why singles and EPs are grouped together. If the request doesn't specify album, single, or compilation, you get everything back grouped in that order, with each group in descending release date order.

Anyway, strictly from the perspective of the API, I don't see a way I could treat EPs and singles differently even if I wanted to. Maybe I could add logic based on the number of tracks. I can't see anyone doing that deliberately in the Spotify UI, but who knows.

With that said, the amount I have played around with the Spotify API is pretty limited. I mostly use it as a relatively easy way to grab data about something I am interested in so I can then do other stuff.